Back in January, Facebook tried to acquire the instant
messaging app Snapchat for $3 billion primarily because of its self-destruct
feature for sent photos. Basically a user can send someone his picture and have
it viewable for a specific amount of time before the image is automatically
deleted. However, the founders of the app – Evan Spiegel and Robert Murphy
declined the offer.
This has left the social networking giant hanging in
mid-air, and with no other options, Facebook made the decision to build its own
app instead that has the same feature. And just yesterday, we saw a quick
glimpse of the app on Apple’s App Store.
The app is called Slingshot
and will have a “sling” feature which will allow users to send images and
videos to their friends. The app will not allow the recipient of the message to
see the photo unless they slingshot something back to the sender. Moreover,
users can annotate and add captions to their photos and just like Snapchat,
images won’t be stored locally on the user’s device.
According to Facebook, the release of the app on iTunes was
purely accidental. In fact, the app is no longer searchable and downloadable on
the App store and is now returning an error message. By the looks of it, the
social networking giant has already made some progress on the app so it might
not take that long for the app to become available.
